Thumbs Down for The Emoji Movie as Dunkirk Stays Atop Box Office

When Sony’s new animated feature The Emoji Movie opened big on Friday, it appeared the reigning box office champ Dunkirk was in for an unexpected battle atop the US box-office. Many had expected Focus Features’ Atomic Blonde to provide the stiffest test to Christopher Nolan’s beachbuster, but the Charlize Theron starring, David Deadpool 2 Leitch directed action film couldn’t reach the lower end of studio expectations.

Eventually an 8% rating on RottenTomatoes is going to count for something, so with the New York Post calling it “the end of the world”, The Emoji Movie levelled out to a weekend gross of approximately $25m.

This meant that in its sophomore frame Dunkirk dropped just 44% with an estimated $28.1m. Christopher Nolan films tend to be in it for the long haul when it comes to their box-office runs, and his critically acclaimed awards frontrunner looks to be matching the multipliers of his previous originals. In the U.K. it was a different story, with the film dropping an incredible 16%, to already surpass the entire lifetime gross of Interstellar, standing at a whopping $35.4m.

The returns for Atomic Blonde weren’t anywhere near as impressive. Buzzed about since SXSW, with a huge marketing presence, one of the directors of John Wick, and putting Charlize Theron in a full throttle action role for the first time since Mad Max: Fury Road, its $18.5m weekend must go down as something of a disappointment.

However, that is the kind of money Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets (read our review here) could only dream of right now. Already sinking to eighth in its second weekend, the $200m+ budgeted film has a domestic cume of $30.6m. Not even the international market can save this one. It looks as though King Arthur: Legend of the Sword won’t be the biggest bomb of the summer season.

Elsewhere, Girls Trip had another great weekend, dipping only 36% with receipts of $20m, as did Spider-Man: Homecoming, which is sticking around in the top 5 by raising its domestic gross to $278.3m, and $633.7m worldwide.

For further details on Wonder Woman’s continued popularity and the limited release success of Kathryn Bigelow’s Detroit, you can head over to BoxOfficeMojo.

Image: Warner Bros. Pictures

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Matthew Rodgers

Matthew Rodgers is a senior writer and film critic at GeekFeed. He has written for HeyUGuys, The Epoch Times, and has contributed to numerous publications over the past decade.